| 书目名称 | Reassessing Lukashenka | | 副标题 | Belarus in Cultural | | 编辑 | Grigory Ioffe | | 视频video | http://file.papertrans.cn/823/822516/822516.mp4 | | 图书封面 |  | | 描述 | What are the factors of Lukashenka‘s longevity at the helm of power? This question is addressed in the context of Belarusian history and identity, not as an outcome of a form of government deceitfully imposed on an allegedly benighted people whom better positioned and informed outsiders seek to enlighten and liberate. | | 出版日期 | Book 2014 | | 关键词 | economy; government; politics; russian and post-soviet politics | | 版次 | 1 | | doi | https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137436757 | | isbn_softcover | 978-1-349-49360-9 | | isbn_ebook | 978-1-137-43675-7 | | copyright | Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2014 |
| 1 |
Front Matter |
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Abstract
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| 2 |
,Introduction, |
Grigory Ioffe |
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Abstract
All my ancestors on my mother’s side are from Belarus. Growing up in Moscow I used to visit my grandparents and my uncle’s family in Minsk, making my first trip to Belarus at the age of three in the early 1950s. Beginning in the early 1960s, my parents put me on the night-time Moscow-Minsk train to spend the two-week long winter break in Minsk. Overall, I have visited Belarus on 30+ occasions, usually spending weeks at a time. Nine of my Belarus trips were made after the breakup of the Soviet Union from my new home base in Radford, Virginia, United States, established in 1990. Meanwhile my Belarusian grandparents passed away, my uncle emigrated to Germany, and his children to Germany and Israel. But I kept going to Belarus whenever I had the chance because I had developed such a strong attachment to the country.
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,Belarusian Economy, |
Grigory Ioffe |
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Abstract
A detailed account of Belarus’s economic development under the Soviets is contained in my earlier publications.. It follows from that account that despite the ingrained systemic flaws of the Soviet economic model, Belarus was by and large a Soviet success story. A country of dismal workshops and unproductive wetlands in the beginning of the 20th century, 70 years later Belarus was dominated by large-scale industry and vastly modernized agriculture. In the 1980s, more than half of the industrial personnel of Belarus worked for enterprises with over 500 employees. Most of the large-scale processing and assembly operations were located in Minsk and the eastern part of the republic.
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,Belarusian Society, |
Grigory Ioffe |
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Abstract
As someone who publishes in American English but who was born and raised far away from the United States I have to make a special effort each time I want to sway the reader to my way of thinking. There is always a chance that my narrative will fail to strike a chord with my Western audience just because my formative experience and that of my audience are far apart. As far as I know, one of the persistent areas of misunderstanding is the impact of national character on the political process and type of dominant political regime. For intellectuals born and raised in Russia, Ukraine, or Belarus, invoking such an impact is a matter of course. Some of those intellectuals realize that there is a chasm between Western and, let’s call it, East Slavic ways of thinking about it. “There are friends of progress and there are so-called reactionaries like myself,” says the Russian film director Andrei Konchalovsky. “The latter think … that culture sways politics, not the other way around, that traditions are too strong, and that a revolution would never lead to liberty. It seems to me that such a conservative, reactionary point of view fits our reality.”. I share Konchalovsky’s opinion, which ma
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,Belarus and the West: From Estrangement to Honeymoon and Back to Estrangement, |
Grigory Ioffe |
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Abstract
To the consumer of world news who happens to be aware of Belarus’s existence, the West’s attitude to it boils down to a burning desire to establish democracy in that country. In 2005, Belarus was labeled Europe’s last dictatorship. and thus an aberration of sorts. The authoritarian regime of President Lukashenka — more specifically, the way it treats internal opposition — is something that deprives Western leaders and Western institutions promoting democracy of a good night’s sleep. What Azerbaijani or Central Asian dictators do (to name just a few post-Soviet cases) is for some reason not nearly as irritating as what the Belarusian leader does.
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,Lukashenka’s Rise to Power and Belarusian Politics, |
Grigory Ioffe |
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Abstract
Alexander Lukashenka was born in 1954 in the rural village of Kopys on the left bank of the Dnieper River in easternmost Belarus. He was raised by a single mother who had only elementary school education. Yekaterina, Lukashenka’s mother, who gave birth to him at the age of 30, had worked for a collective farm before the Second World War. After the war, she got a job as rail trackwalker and then as a worker at the flax factory in Orsha. Alexander was born out of wedlock, and the personality of his father is unknown. “Lukashenka” is his mother’s maiden name. Yekaterina Lukashenka continued to work at the same flax factory until 1957, and until the age of three, Alexander was taken care of by her sisters in Kopys. By today’s standards, Orsha is not far from Kopys, just some 30 km, but in 1950s’ war-ravaged Belarus, it was next to impossible for a person of modest means to make a daily commute from Kopys to Orsha. In 1957, Yekaterina moved from Orsha to Alexandria, a village on the right bank of the Dnieper River. Founded in the 1930s as a product of hamlet consolidation schemes, Alexandria, located just across the river from Kopys, was a larger village with more than 600 residents, th
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,Lukashenka’s Personality and Worldview, |
Grigory Ioffe |
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Abstract
The available accounts of Lukashenka’s character range between dismissive and stridently negative to approvingly unctuous.. There are few balanced accounts as opinions of Lukashenka are polarized and seem to shape the perceptions of the man, not the other way around. Still, some authors at least make an attempt to come across as impartial. One professedly impartial account was authored by Ales Antsypenka and Valer Bulgakaw. and another by Valery Karbalevich.
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,Conclusion, |
Grigory Ioffe |
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Abstract
Belarusians never fought for independence, which came to most of them as a shock. Of all the countries that emerged from the ruins of the Soviet Union, Belarus had been the most vulnerable one from the outset. All post-Soviet countries faced the problem of weaning themselves from economic dependency on Russia. But none has been so thoroughly specialized on the secondary stages of the production chains originating in Russia, with processing and assembling facilities still reasonably new and advanced, at least by the standards of the late 1980s, so there has been no credible reason to shut them down some 5–20 years later. Today, no other country in the world is a member of so many international bodies in which Russia participates. These are the Union State of Russia and Belarus, the Eurasian Economic Community (EurAsEC), the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), and the Common Economic Space among the CIS countries of Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.
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,Addendum, |
Grigory Ioffe |
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Abstract
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| 10 |
Back Matter |
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Abstract
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